what concerns me is that there very well may be a collection of personal information stored in an easily accessed location if you know where to look. it may be possible that someone or something is paying attention to what we do.

The Orwell vision is already true. It's called television.

The problem isn't data in a single place, but data in many easily-accessed places. Your ISP can track everywhere you go, as can anyone upstream of them, and each site you visit records your visit by IP and time. Anyone with access to many sites can quickly figure out who is who by finding out which IPs were where at each time.